LM8 – WWW & Internet

First, to understand where we are going or where we need to go, it is necessary to understand where we have been so consider this from American History.

It is easy to forget that one of the contributing factors of the American Revolution was our communication system that was more advanced than communication systems in other parts of the world. Postmaster General Benjamin Franklin had created a network of horse riders that rode through the night to deliver mail and newspapers. When the Boston Massacre took place word spread throughout the colonies before word reached England and Europe. Now couple this with the colonist’s high literacy rate and belief that they should have access to information stemming from their largely puritanical common ancestry and it is easy to see the result. Now consider that we see similarities to today’s Internet and net neutrality and social computing effects. Recall my continual presentation that we need to assess everything we do from the business-IT-society triangle perspective. In this case, the early American communication system drove changes in society => Revolution. We recently saw this occur again as Facebook fueled a revolution in Egypt.

Now, please read the following Internet and WWW history as this drives home the difference between the Internet and WWW.

Lecture Recordings are here but please read on as I provide significant additional content throughout this page and in the sub-menu.

Standards

Standards are necessary to ensure functionality and inter-operability across platforms. We have already learned about the device drivers that provide a standard interface to the OS and the OS which provides a standard interface to users and applications. Last week in networking we learned about the TCP/IP protocol stack which standardizes Internet communications however the WWW must also be standardized and this is accomplished with W3C compliance. Standards will also become even more important with the emergence and evolution of the IoT. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is located here: http://www.w3.org/

Now if you are a Web designer you should be testing your pages on all platforms and browsers. A nice way to test all platforms is through virtualization as you can maintain legacy OSs and their browsers.

Domain Name Service (DNS)

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers on the Internet. DNS facilitates abstraction allowing us humans to use Domain Names or URLs that contain Domain Names as part of the address rather than remembering numeric logical IP addresses. The DNS protocol maps Domain Names into IP addresses which of course must be resolved to physical addresses for end to end delivery. When your computer receives its IP address (often using DHCP) it also receives the name/location of a DNS server to use. Note DNS uses the user datagram protocol (UDP) in contrast to TCP so it is connectionless.

Search

First let’s understand search from the user’s perspective so please see the sub-menu on Search. Later in the course (Web Design & E-Commerce) we will look at the need for organizations to optimize their ability to be found through search (i.e. Search Engine Optimization or SEO).

In computing, a stateless protocol is a communications protocol that treats each request as an independent transaction that is unrelated to any previous request so that the communication consists of independent pairs of request and response. A stateless protocol does not require the server to retain session information or status about each communications partner for the duration of multiple requests (saves memory). In contrast, a protocol which requires keeping of the internal state on the server is known as a stateful protocol.

HTTP Cookies are necessary for session management (e-commerce, social networking, etc.) but they can also compromise your privacy.

Privacy

Privacy and security are huge and we will look at these in more detail in upcoming Security LMs but let’s initially be aware of profiling and location based services.

Profiling

Have a look at your Google Ads Preferences to see what the online world deduces about you. Then look at my Chrome Collusion plugin and its results and with this basis you may wish to opt-out and prevent cookie setting (see Lecture Captures for what I use).

Location based Services & GEO Tagging

This of course provides great usability and functionality but search the Emergent Topics (Tags: Location and geo-tagging) for emergent privacy concerns.

N-Tier Architecture

The Web today is characterized by a n-tier architecture. Typically this is a 3-tier architecture comprised of a database core, middle tier business logic and a Web server. When a user requests a webpage, the middle tier business logic accesses information from the database core and constructs a webpage which is sent out by the Web server. For one of the CISS 100 Final Projects, you will have an option to implement this architecture using the LAMP (Linux, Apache Web server, MySQL database and PHP programming for the middle tier business logic).

Deep Web

Please see sub-menu

Internet of Things (IoT) quickly evolving into the Internet of Everything

Please see sub-menu but note the IoT has been facilitated by the move from IPv4 (32 bit addressing) to IPv6 (128 bit addressing).

Ok, we know where we’ve been but now it time to define where we should go by Sir Tim Berners-Lee